The Wasp Micro Air Vehicle

Victor Cheng writes "In developments that bring together a variety of technologies including robotics and digital imaging the Wasp Micro Air Vehicle is one of the Pentagon's latest tools currently in testing of the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group (although I'm thinking its not going to need a carrier to get this one up and flying). The 13 inch Wasp comes equipped with 2 video cameras, GPS and has a myriad of possible applications. Next time you hear something Buzzing around when you're at a family picnic you might think twice before swatting it could be an expensive action."

Comments

Swat it?

[FirienFirien]

Swatting a 13-inch wasp is unlikely. Scream and run away, or possibly even cower and say "I for one welcome our giant robot wasp overlords"...

Re:Swat it?

[FirienFirien]

More seriously, I'm surprised by the size of it. It seems like an RC light powered plane with inbuilt gizmos in the wings - I had seriously expected the Pentagon to be a huge amount smaller than this, with a vague thought of hover. I guess without the wireless power (see the /. story, NASA prizes) available yet these things have to carry their own fuel, and then the structure needs to be larger and more supportive, enough physical strength to support power loading, and space for the gizmos. But... 13 inches. And since I don't have a concievable way of saying it without innuendo... that's BIG.

Re:Swat it?

[MyLongNickName]

I don't think it is THAT big. It will be very useful for keeping an eye on a small area (say a block in Falluja) without being obvious. No, it is not designed to fly five foot over Osama without it being noticed. But this doesn't make it useless.

Re:Swat it?

[hey!]

Suppose they had an autonomous surveillance vehicle that was literally the size of a housefly. Do you think they'd tell us?

Not that I think such a thing could be built right now, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't on somebody's drawing board. American needs intelligence and loves technical fixes. If there's a technical solution to an intelligence problem, somebody's bound to be workig on it. Remember how US Navy subs tapped Soviet undersea communication cables right in their harbors?

I actually surprised they acknowledge that something this size exists. It's small enough that it is probably hard to distinguish from a sea bird.

Re:Swat it?

[SparkyTWP]

I worked for a company called Aerovironment over the summer that did a lot of research in this area (They won several DARPA contracts relating to these), and from I've seen, it is very difficult to make these smaller. Now, I am an electrical engineer and not an aero, so I can't really give details of the aero stuff, but you can get the idea...

An amazing amount of electronics has to fit in a very tiny area. Things like cameras, GPS, flight control, servos, batteries, etc... all add up. The batteries are probably the biggest weight on the plane. You also have to consider the effects like propeller wash on the airfoil, and how the small size will affect its handling.

It also isn't that practical to make them smaller for stealth, because like someone mentioned below, they are very quiet. Aerovironment has hand-launched planes that are much bigger than this (Something like a 4-5 foot wingspan) and after they are up a few hundred feet or so, you can't hear the electric motor anymore and you have to struggle to find it in the air if you don't know where it is.

The push to go smaller is to make it easier to transport and carry out into the field. With planes of these sizes, the plane and the base station could all fit into one breifcase instead of a few breifcases as with a typical hand-launched UAV.

Not they can't get smaller, but there are serious tradeoffs for doing so.

Yesterday's News

[amigoro]

The story is more than 2 years old.

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that's stale.

Re:Yesterday's News

[dpmapping]

reading the mithuro story, it seems that this is WASP v2. The earlier article was aircraft only, these ones can see as well as fly!

Re:Yesterday's News

[Rolo Tomasi]

Also, the original (prototype?) was manually controlled, while the new one seems to be semi-autonomous, with GPS and waypoint navigation. So this is actually current news, though the photograph might be an old one.

A neat little toy...

[HaloZero]

Question is, how close do you have to be to use it? I mean, it's got a whole bunch of applications, though it doesn't look very stealthy, other than it's size. The article(s) say that it's intended for use with ship-to-ship boardings, but nothing mentions it's actual operational range. I mean, if the thing isn't good for atleast 1500 feet (plus having enough power to make it through steel bulkheads if it has to go anyplace but topside), you might as well not use it. Also wonder how long the battery life is on that little gadget. I'm sure the US Navy thinks of them as disposable, so recharability isn't exactly priority, but with an electrical system sucking on power for both flight operations, two cameras, and an RF stream, it's got to have a nice big pair on it.

Next question, where can I get one and how much?

Re:A neat little toy...

[johnjay]

I could see an application for this in use against smugglers... Fly two wasps out in front of the coast guard cutter to put the suspect ship in the center of a triangle of viewpoints. Open water, no flying inside the other ship. In theory, the wasps would have enough power/range to be in place before the coast guard got close. Since the badguys' focus would be on the coast guard, the wasps would be stealthy enough and provide a view of the hidden side of the boat (in case anything was quickly dumped) and a hint at the kind of arms the smugglers might have.

Privacy

[soniCron88]

"Next time you hear something Buzzing around when you're at a family picnic you might think twice before swatting it could be an expensive action."

Like hell I'd pay for it. Gov't should be think twice before spying on its citizens. Especially at such a close range!

Re:Privacy

[Richthofen80]

The only people these UAVs will be spying on are enemy combatants in hostile theatre. If the government wishes to spy on its own citizens, there are far more effective means. There are a large number of survelliance cameras in the US and elsewhere, not to mention satellite imagery and 'bugs'.

The reasons they build UAVs in the first place is because they can't bring agents into the area, because its still too hostile. I hardly think a family picnic is so 'hostile' as to require a UAV.

Re:Privacy

[SupremeSpod]

> The only people these UAVs will be spying on are enemy combatants in hostile theatre.

Which is pretty much the rest of the world thanks to your idiot of a President!

Re:Privacy

[Cyn]

The reasons they build UAVs in the first place is because they can't bring agents into the area, because its still too hostile. I hardly think a family picnic is so 'hostile' as to require a UAV.

Clearly you've never been to one of my family picnics!

Don't need a carrier for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they've made a special 4 foot long mini-nimitz to go with it? That way you could fit an entire carrier group in your garden pond. How cool would that be?

Re:Don't need a carrier for this?

[TapeCutter]

My goldfish want to know if the mini carrier group can be programmed to attack cats.

If you buzzed and took pictures at my picnic

[Moraelin]

I do believe you'd get that thing swatted, stomped and whacked with a hammer/shovel/whatever-is-handy for good measure too. And you might be looking at a lawsuit too.

Basically I see the point in this thing, but the metaphor in the summary is an awful one. That it's useful for a lot of other things, is obvious. But using it to annoy others and invade their privacy, is one use I'm not entirely looking forward to.

Read a little further...

[tyroneking]

and you'll find this article (http://www.defensetech.org/archives/001084.html) which talks about an even stranger flying vehicle.

Glass Half Full, Really

[Scoria]

You have the wrong perspective. Slashdot stories are more like a fine Merlot than leftover potato chips. They don't produce stories with class like this anymore!

Scales a little off?

[dreamquick]

"next time you hear something Buzzing around when you're at a family picnic"

If its a 13 inch wasp (just over a foot), then quite frankly if something that size starts buzzing around a family picnic I doubt it would be able to hide from you all that well, and secondly I doubt anyone would be stupid enough to attack a foot-long wasp with a rolled up newspaper or magazine.

If horror films have taught us nothing it's that when freakishly large mutant insects attack (TM) you just run and hope you aren't the extra with no name who's destined to die in the first 20 minutes.

*sigh* Journalists these days...

One possible application

[Moggie68]

Search operation at sea. A couple of platoons of these could cover countless square kilometers in a hurry. You'd only need the spotters to monitor the video feed for any found subjects. Half the manpower as you'd skip the need for pilots.

Re:One possible application

[amanox]

You probably don't need a lot of spotters if you have the right video recognition software. A human can only watch so may screens at once, while software does not have this problem.
Spotters will only have to watch video-fragments that the sofware recognizes as being potential hits.
This could speed up and reduce cost of those search-actions a lot.

Design flaws?

[Libor Vanek]

- How recharge batteries in the middle of battlefield?
- What about wind? Make war only when no wind?
- My got - why do they test this on for the NAVY? I'm pretty sure, that range sucks (compared to old, but still usefull device called "radar"). I can imagine this usefull for street fights

Balance?

[Futurepower(R)]

Any amount of taxpayer money for violence. None for peace.

Re:Balance?

[amanox]

I wouldn't say none goes to peace, but indeed, a large ammount goes to war.

Re:Balance?

[Obstin8]

I think there are many civilian situations where this can be applied: Search and Rescue, firefighting , both urban (tall buildings) and wilderness (forest fires -- and no, not as a water carrier), remote inspection (dams, hydro towers), enviromental monitoring (forestry).

This technology is not 'violent' per se, any more than the Internet is 'violence-based' just because the military had a (big) hand in building it.

---
Remember, it's never to late to have a happy childhood!

Re:Balance?

[jotok]

Any amount of taxpayer money for violence. None for peace.

Quick question, what qualifies as money for peace?

I ask because someone repeated your exact words to me the other day and none of the things of which I could think on which we do spend money (other than making weapons or moving them and their operators around the globe) qualified as "peace."

Environmentalism, education, health care, foreign aid, etc. Whatever your take on how the current administration is shortchanging these areas for allocation of funds, we still do it--but they don't seem to count for "peace" so I'm wondering what does, exactly?

Re:Balance?

[ScentCone]

Any amount of taxpayer money for violence. None for peace.

That's some pretty lame rhetoric, since it's just so demonstrably false. Ignore, for the moment, that we (the US taxpayers) have put more money and effort into establishing democracy, disaster relief, feeding and medicating poor countries, and so on, than any other economy in history. Let's focus instead on the technology mentioned in this article. Stuff like this, that makes our armed forces more efficient and risks fewer lives in the course of doing their business, reduces violence. The whole point is that as we get more precise, better informed, and more surgical in how we deal with bad actors, we don't have to use as many heavy duty, indiscriminate weapons. People wail and moan about the collateral damage from doing things like kicking Iraq out of Kuwait... but that conflict saw the debut of our military carefully avoiding older (much more violent) tactics and weapons. If we'd still been using the WWII/Korea/Vietnam style weapons and tactics, we'd have been much more "violent" to accomplish the same required result. Every time we trot out these new tools, we cut down on how heavy handed we have to be, and the bad guys (who read this site, too), are more and more aware of how difficult it is to conduct various murderous affairs.

In this particular case, a tool like this that helps the Coast Guard or Navy take a closer look a ship before sending men and women over in person will absolutely reduce the risk of ambush, suicide attacks, and other problems that have killed our people in the past. Since so many other comments here point out the obvious non-conflict uses for this technology, I won't repeat those (great as they are), but I will close by saying that force used to put a stop to someone else's violence is a perfectly rational use of our military. As long as there are regimes like North Korea shipping out boatloads of missiles and explosives to places like Syria for sale to malicious third parties, superior military technology on our part will continue to reduce violence and save lives.

Re:Balance?

[Threni]

> Stuff like this, that makes our armed forces more efficient and risks fewer
> lives in the course of doing their business, reduces violence.

Anyone who believes taht making the American armed forces more efficient will result in less violence and less risked lives has clearly been living in another universe for the last 50 odd years.

Worked out why most of the people on the planet are against the actions of the US government yet? How about reading `understanding power` or `hegemony or survival` by Chomsky for starters.

Re:Balance?

[ScentCone]

prefer the modern military of Denmark, Canada etc, not that of the Americans, who spent more on their military than the rest of the world combined.

So you obviously aren't expecting the Danes or the Canadians to jump up and deal with, say, large scale armed conflicts in the middle east? Say, when someone like Saddam invades Kuwait to grab oil fields and coastline? The point is, when Danish or Canadian forces are involved in those conflicts, they rely on communications and logistics infrastructure provided by the US. As does the rest of the European military, such as it is, through NATO. I'm not picking on the members of the armed forces from any of those countries - I'm responding to your comment about what those countries "spend" as opposed to what the US spends. Those other countries avoid huge, huge expenses because the US has already spent (and continues to spend) it. There's a reason that places like the Balkans just smolder away, with thousands of civilians being killed on all sides, until NATO (powered primarily by US technology and spending) gets involved. Local Euro forces simply weren't able (and their politicians didn't have the backbone) to deal with it.

Part of my family is Danish, and I generally like the culture, but they're getting the easy end of the deal, that's for sure. They keep an army for those rare domestic reasons they might need one, and they sign treaties so that they can be involved with the US (or expect help from the US) when something more alarming comes up. But they avoid the large cost of being ready for bigger things, while US taxpayers foot the bill. But that's an expense we've been paying through both world wars and the cold war, and even though we've sharply reduced the size of our military since the end of that war, we're still the folks that Danes, Canadians, and everyone else turn to for high-end field logistics, equipment, IT, communications, and everything else that's used to minimize the loss of life (on all sides).

Many, many more civilians were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by the US military than were killed in the 9/11 attacks

Unfortunately, the sort of people that are trying to keep the wider middle east running as one big mysoginistic, medieval, brutality-fest have a bad habit of keeping their insurgents and weapons in schoolyards, mosques, and behind women and children. Rooting these thugs out the hard way has cost a lot more soldiers and marines than it would have if we simply leveled every neighborhood where these guys had a foothold. But that WWII way of doing things is long past, and despite Al Jazeera's gleeful film-looping every bit of (one side of) the misery involved, the results are fantastically more surgical than at any time in the history of such actions. Oh, and hundreds of millions of dollars later, those places that served as strongholds for these guys have newer buildings, roads, schools, utilities, and so on than they've ever had. That work is being safeguarded and funded, of course, by US (including its military people and tax dollars).

Re:Balance?

[ScentCone]

Anyone who believes taht making the American armed forces more efficient will result in less violence and less risked lives has clearly been living in another universe for the last 50 odd years.

You're confusing tools and technology with the policies that put them to work. I think those policies are largely correct, but that's a different discussion. Once a policy decision has been made (say, to step in an help end the ethnic clensing of thousands of people in the Balkans), the newer tools and tactics of the US military achieved exactly what I'm talking about: effective use against the intended targets, and a great decrease in the side effects. If we had not spent so much money on developing those tools and training our people in their use, we'd still be having to use the approaches used in WWII. In fact, the US has so raised the threshold for expectations of minimal collateral damage as we do things like help disable the militants in Serbia and Croatia, that any slip-up of any kind is now seen as horrible. Any unintended loss of life is horrible - but we're able now to disable bad guys (even those who set up shop in mosques and schools) with a previously inconceivable surgical skill. This is different, of course, than, say, blowing up trainloads of commuters in Spain, or burning partiers alive in Bali nightclubs. But the same tools that allow us to keep equipment working in the combat field also allowed us to ferry supplies and support into the recent tsunami-damaged area well before any other sort of major relief could have helped there.

Re:Balance?

[Threni]

Is IS dumb. But who's saying it? I didn't. What's the connection between carpet bombing civilians in Afghanistan, and bringing to justice the people responsible for the 9/11 attack? Because Saudi national bin Laden happened to be in Afghanistan at the time of, or at least shortly after, the attacks? What if he'd been in Denmark, or Brazil? Or is it because there are `terrorist` training camps in Afghanistan? But there are `terrorist` training camps in the US too. It's always worth asking what the response would be from the people acting as agressors were they to be at the receiving end. If Brazil had bombed the US because a Greek guy had been in Florida at the time a French guy had committed a 9/11-style attack in Brazil, would you be applying the same logic?

Poor performance

[Anonymous Coward]

With sub 2 hour endurance, the Nimitz will have to be tied up to the pier to make this thing useful.

I think a more viable role for it would be to spy on protesters right here in the good 'ol USA.

As for expensive, my park flyer does the same thing (well, almost) and it was $500.

Powerconsumption

[Underholdning]

At 12 pounds I wonder how long time this can be in the air before it needs to be recharged?

Surveillance

[elgatozorbas]

A few years ago we had a master's thesis (jointly with the military school) evaluating the design of such a vehicle. These vehicles are mostly meant for observation, and can even be equipped with a radar (which was the case).

The main challenge is, not surprisingly, the weight. One of the trade-offs we were faced with was wether to do signal processing on the plane (requiring more CPU), or on the ground (requiring more link capacity). Another problem is that, because it is so small, it is very prone to wind, vibrations etc which have to be taken into account when post-processing

why do they test this on for the NAVY?

[TapeCutter]

They are perfect for boarding a ship from a safe distance. A hostile ship that has been stopped knows you will blow them out of the water if your wasps are attacked. You could land your team on the deck with a chopper in relative saftey.

The most dangerous situations are when opposing forces are within close range of each other, the ability to "see" better in any situation is a distinct advantage.

Wind - Read what Sun Tsu has to say about battlefield weather.

Batteries - Handled by the supply line, if that is broken "feed" of the enemy.

Street fights - It works via preprogrammed GPS points that are probably not acurate enough (not to mention being shot at while you punch in the route coordinates). The video cammera on an assult rifle is a better idea. Could be usefull in a city wide seige, mortars, tanks, and many other longer range weapons at the front line could use a "swarm" to direct fire.

If you read between the lines it appears drones are already widely used in the middle east with varying degrees of "success". Some larger drones are armed and have reportedly been used in "targeted killings". The problem with using helicopters is that there is media everywhere when one is shot down. Nobody cares if an "experimental" drone is shot out of the sky (or swatted at the picnic table).

Re:Grammar Nazi Strikes Again!

[archeopterix]

"Next time you hear something Buzzing around when you're at a family picnic you might think twice before swatting it could be an expensive action."

Slashdot editors are above grammar is for nazis only.

Micro Air Vehicle!!!

[richieb]

When I was a kid we used to call these things "model airplanes". :-)

A great paper on MAV design

[Thagg]

The same team that built this Wasp built a smaller (!) micro air vehicle a couple of years earlier. This paper describes the design and implementation of the project at a good level of detail -- enough to show the complexity and tradeoffs in design, but not so much to bury the reader in equations and minutia.

What fascinates me about MAVs is that you can do absolute cutting-edge research on a shoestring budget. Many prototypes can be designed, analyzed, built, tested, and thrown away.

Thad Beier

Robofly

[heatuser]

This story reminds me of the robot fly created by Ron Fearing of UC Berkeley and Michael Dickinson of Caltech some years ago. Check it out: http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/mm/spingar nkoff/flyorama/robofly.html

Re:Next, teach it to recognize humans..

[Greyfox]

I saw a discovery channel special where they were talking about nifty tech on the battlefield and one of the things that was shown was a flying thing very much like this, and it had a self destruct button that would make it explode with about the same force as a hand grenade. Ouch. If you wanted a slightly more elegant solution, you could outfit it with an air gun and have it shoot tiny ricin poison pellets. Especially if you want to take an installation without having to scrub the people bits off the walls after you move in.

Payload

[fox9397]

Now if you were able to have a payload of say a water balloon or an M80 I could see its use in neighborhood warfare.

Wasp of Old

[Howler]

I seem to remember seeing on a show called, "That's Incredible" many years ago...and I mean many, that there was an army vehicle in development that was called, "The Wasp".

This "Wasp" however, was more along the lines of the old Dick Tracy trashcan flyers. "That's Incredible" even had footage of the vehicle in flight as demonstrated by Army personel. The intent was for rapid removal of injured from the battle field and for recon...mostly recon as I remember.

The details as I recall them are that the pilot stood in this large "trash can" like thing that had room for two personel (standing/limping). It could fly at tree top level at about 60 to 70mph. It was stated that the vehicle used the jet engine from a cruise missle.

The video they showed on the show showed the vehicle lifting vertically, sliding left, right and backwards as well as cruising at treetop level very quickly.

I thought that it was the coolest thing I had seen way back then. Does anyone else happen to remember this?

Oh, the humbling of naval aviation!

[DulcetTone]

The brave efforts of the past will never be repeated!

Then: "Torpedo Eight has been wiped out, sir!"
Now: "Torpedo Eight is stuck in a tree, sir!"

tone

Why Nimitz?

[mwood]

One thing a carrier battle group is good for is to easily go to a place where nobody has any legitimate business being, cordon off a huge area, and handily destroy anybody who refuses to stay out. At sea there's *no* cover (optical or radar) above the surface, and zero collateral damage if you have to get seriously nasty.

That's not all. If your test vehicle flies off and crashes, it sinks, winding up where only governments can get at it, and you probably have a recovery vehicle attached to scoop it up before anyone else does. You can position and reposition armored obstacles as needed for testing and have plenty of complex objects to find and photograph -- you don't have to build anything.

Smaller autonomous recon vehicles

[Infonaut]

Insect-sized surveillance vehicles have been in the works for some time. I saw a pitch at the Pentagon for something similar to this in 1996 or '97. The point of a very small autonomous surveillance platform is that it can be used in tactical situations. It's not for looking at North Korean missile facilities, it's for checking out the inside of that building your platoon is about to assault.

The obvious early adopters of a tool like this would be Delta Force, because so much of their work involves forced entry. If such a vehicle existed, they'd put it through its paces before it trickled down to Special Forces and SEAL operators, and finally down to regular light infantry forces.

Re:More importantly...

[tehcrazybob]

A 13" paper plane will have no chance of returning alive if it isn't taking off from a stationary carrier in calm see and no wind. It will have a very short range and speed. Bottom line: will it ever be able to see what a powerful set of binoculars wouldn't be able to see from the carrier anyways? And also, what't the point of having the stealth of a 13" paper plane, when just a few kilometers away is a ginormous aircraft carrier?

First, it's not a paper airplane, it's probably made of a bunch of exotic lightweight plastics and composite materials. I also wouldn't be surprised if it was capable of going faster than 15 knots. Then again, if you are attacking some smugglers, it's unlikely you are going to be doing it with an aircraft carrier - those are not generally used for direct ship-to-ship combat. It's likely you would be on a smaller, more heavily armed ship, and you could float around at a safe distance and go take a peek with your planes. You know, just to make sure they aren't all packing rocket launchers.

As for the binoculars: The key with this plane isn't getting a closer view of the same thing. If that's what we wanted, we could get telescopes big enough to watch the rust spreading on the hull of the other ship. The point of this is to get a view of something from a different direction. I don't care how powerful your binoculars are, they aren't going to be able to see the back of a ship you are approaching from the front.

University of Florida...

[PjSunray]

I recall a story on something similar a few years back. A University of Florida MAV research project that had little carbon fiber versions of these, with an integrated video camera. The camera feed went into a land based computer which did image processing, calculating the location of the horizon, therefore giving the computer an effective artificial horizon to work with. With this data, the computer sent rc signals back to the plane, basically providing it with wing leveling capabilities. Researchers could provide bank, pitch and power inputs, and the wing leveler would respond appropriately.

It was a very cool project, and they had lots of video demos...unfortunately it just seemed to drop off the face of the earth. My thoughts were that it had been coopted by the military for something like this.

Anyway, here's the original URL. If anyone has any followup info on this story, speak up!
http://aeroweb.aero.ufl.edu/microav

Neat civilian use...

[quarkscat]

Imagine an autonomous beowolf cluster of these.
It would bring an entirely new level to the
quality of trap/skeet shotgun competition.
I, for one, can hardly wait...

WASP

[eclectic4]

" you might think twice before swatting it could be an expensive action."

A 13" White Anglo-Saxon Prodestant with two video cameras and a GPS device? I agree, you're just asking for trouble coming at that with a fly swatter.